Digital and Online Marketing Musings. Good, bad and ugly.

Tag Archives: advertising

I am very lucky to have seen the media world from various angles; working for over a decade in media sales starting with computer magazines through to digital display, affiliate and email; then spending 7 years planning and buying online media at agencies, and finally ending up where I am now, doing digital marketing contracts within client organisations.

The journey has taken me a long time, but as a result I now have some pretty good insights into why you should or shouldn’t use an agency and also what it’s like to walk in the shoes of those involved.

My main take out has been that we will all do our jobs better if we understand more about the context in which our internal and external partners work; and it is for this reason that I’ve previously summarised The Top 5 tips for Selling Media to Agencies. To continue with the theme, with a few more months experience working client side, today I give you The Top 5 Agency Tips to Keeping A Client Happy.

1) Find out what it is they’re judged on

Each time you take on a new client, a new product or campaign within an organisation, your most important priority is to set the goalposts. There is no point working painstakingly for weeks on a campaign that builds reach and frequency if the client (or the client’s boss) is only going to ask “How many sales did we make?”. Similarly if you are able to report on digital sales only, but don’t get to see offline or unattributed sales fluctuations you may be seriously hampering your campaign’s performance and under or over reporting the impact it has on the client’s bottom line.

And the bottom line is always the bottom line. I have yet to find a client who doesn’t end by judging their media by the financial impact it has, nomatter how much they say they want to be innovative and “go beyond the banner” and have cut through and win awards. It’s money, plain and simple.

You can make your life even easier by putting this one figure at the top of your report each day/week/month. Why make the client scroll through lines of data when the only figure their boss asks is “Are we up or down?”. Give them that figure at the top, big and bold with context (week on week, month on month, year on year), and then explain more later. Don’t make them search for it.

2) Pro-actively send them information

I know only too well about the resource pressures within an agency environment, but

if your job is to provide the client report on Monday by 10 O’clock, DO IT!

Don’t wait till they natter, don’t think you’ve got a few hours leeway if they don’t seem to have noticed. That time will have been set for a reason – they may have a sales or board meeting at 11 where they will be asked about the figures. If they’ve been stuck in another meeting until then, and are relying on you to have sent the data through so they can access it on the fly, do you want to be the person who makes them look stupid in front of their board?

If there are operational reasons why it’s difficult to get the data to them at that time – the ad server hasn’t updated sales, the report is bespoke and complex and can’t be done that quickly – then sit down with them and ask them what they can get away with. Many a time I have sent a client simple preliminary data (with caveats) only to follow up later with more mature data with a full analysis. Believe me, when the report lands in their inbox your client will breathe a sigh of relief because NOMATTER WHAT IT SAYS, some data is better than radio silence.

Resource pressures allowing, try to always give them more information that the basic SLA states. If you show interest in their business and show examples of something relevant that another client has done, some media developments as a stimulus or do a bit of extra digging in competitor trends for some context, they will be nothing but happy. This point really matters when the client comes up for pitch, as you can guarantee that the other agencies will throw all sorts of innovative solutions at them to show the difference they can make, and the last thing you want is “Well, we stopped sending you ideas as you always said No.” to be your excuse when they mark you down and you lose the pitch on innovation.

3) Don’t insult their decisions

I’ve said this before (here) and I’ll say it again – they may have access to information that you don’t have. So…

EVEN IF THEY SEEM TO BE TOTALLY INSANE do not insult the decisions they make.

By all means ask questions about them, state (politely) why you may have done things differently and make caveats in your forecasts where you think these decisions will impact negatively on the performance metrics that you can see, but it is the height of arrogance to assume that you know their business better than them. You may know media, you may know how to get people to their website, but you are probably not seeing a whole pile of data that gives an entirely different context to performance.

An example of this is using ad server/search tool data as gospel. Recently I had to stop an agency from continually over optimising an account, reducing potential lead volumes based on AdWords data, when the data of record for the company was the Google Analytics integrated search CPA, which was much healthier and meant that rather than reducing spend/bids, they could have been a lot braver.

Had they been given access to the data? Yes.

Did they bother looking? No.

Did they send a report that criticised my decisions based on their incomplete data? Yes.

Will they remain our supplier for long? No.

4) Find a positive in everything

Sometimes things go wrong in business and marketing. Products fail or get bad PR, messaging doesn’t create any impact, a competitor launches a spoiler. Recessions happen. Sometimes it’s the media choices, season, targeting or forecasting. Sometimes you just don’t know. But there is ALWAYS something you can learn from a campaign. Even if that thing is “We won’t do it again in that way”.

There is nothing more depressing for a client to receive (or, I imagine, an agency account manager to write) than a post-campaign report where the results have fallen far short of the forecast or target, especially if there’s no obvious explanation; but you can rescue the wreckage by highlighting ways that other clients have improved things when faced with a seemingly dismal failure. One way to change the way you put things in context is to always to have 10% of your budget allocated to testing new things (especially in the ever changing digital world). This means that any test that fails is not seen as the end of the world, and instead a fundamental part of the development process.

If you call it a test and it fails, it’s a learning.

If you call it a plan and it fails, it’s failure.

I know which one I’d be happier to discuss with my client/boss.

5) Tell them the “So what?”

Data. We’re all drowning in it. And the data you send to your client will be only a tiny part of the data they see each day.

Digital media’s very trackability is the reason it remains the healthiest part of the advertising market (granted, it is also a stick with which it can be beaten). The result of all this data can be inertia as we all struggle to put it into context and gain anything actionable. This is where you can make your client look like a superstar.

Here’s some online sales data. I’ve graphed it as a monthly trend. It still means nothing unless I know how it compares to

other companies doing the same thing

seasonality expectations

my own company/product performance in the past

my forecasts and targets

Good or bad are all relative concepts, and it is your job to take your client from data driven inertia to the “So what?” – think about what it means. How different is it to what you expected – AND WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND THEY DO ABOUT IT NOW?

Give them potential actions to take to their boss, even extreme ones to get them thinking.

Do they choose between:

cancel the project

change the creative

recall the product

change the media mix

add international markets

double the spend

change the landing page

expand the product range

add a phone number

For every campaign learning, there should be a recommendation that the business can do to either capitalise on it, or avoid it in the future. State these and give your client an action plan to test these new recommendations (remember, tests don’t fail, they become learnings), and then you have a process of constant testing and learn, that WILL lead to success over time.

Having been in the media industry for *cough* 20 years this year, the scales fell from my eyes a long time ago. I assumed that everyone approached media and advertising with the same slightly raised eyebrow as me, so when people who don’t work in media (and hence probably do real jobs) express righteous anger at Facebook redesigns, their dwindling sense of privacy or misguidedly share one of those annoying “I hereby do not give you right to do blah blah…..” notices I am genuinely surprised that some people really haven’t figured it out.

For the avoidance of doubt, Facebook is a commercial entity, as is Google, as is ITV.

They are not publicly funded like the BBC, therefore their sole reason for creating ANYTHING is to make you use it and watch it – so that they can sell advertising around it. In addition to that, they can get more money for their advertising if they know more about their audience (yes, that’s you).

To give an example – imagine that Disney are selling their new animated kids’ movie. They may be willing to pay a certain amount for their ad to be seen in front of a thousand people. If those people can be proven to be parents, then their perceived value of those eyeballs grows. This makes the newspaper/magazine/TV station/website publisher much happier, and gives them an incentive to find out as much about you as they can, to increase your value to their advertisers.

If there is even further information available about viewers/listeners/users, such as the age of their children, whether they’ve liked other Disney animated films and if they’ve visited one of the Disney Parks in the last 12 months – that value can further grow enormously as it’s a good indicator that they’re more likely to buy the advertiser’s product.

Here’s an example of how it works on Facebook:

Facebook audience targeting

For the basic UK adult targeting above, Facebook recommends a CPC (cost per click) bid of between 25p to 54p, How much of this you’ll have to pay will depend on how fast you want to spend your budget, and supply and demand at the time you go live.

Now see what happens if you add some extra criteria about family status:

Facebook audience targeting with children aged 4-12.

As you can see, the number of people in the target audience has dropped (to less than 10% of the original number), and the price you’ll have to pay to show them your ads has increased, by about 30%. If these people respond more frequently to the ads and therefore the advertiser sells more DVDs, then it’s evidently still worth their while to pay a bit more, so everyone’s still happy.

But how much do they really know about me?

Well traditionally “brand” advertising has been sold around content, so you’ll see different ads around America’s Next Top Model than you do around Wheeler Dealers. The assumption is that certain types of people (gender, age bracket, purchasing habits) trend towards certain content.

Direct advertising, and especially since the growth of the internet is more likely to be sold around what we know about the person themselves.

ACORN advert for regional classification for advertisers

The 80s saw the launch of ACORN (A Classification of Regional Neighbourhoods) in the States, which segmented all US areas into demographic types – which was used to help advertisers to accurately target their direct mail and later TV, and now online across most countries.

Clearly people living in areas classified as “02 – Affluent working families with mortgages” will be worth more to the advertiser than “48 – Low incomes, high unemployment, single parents”.

It has ever been thus and means that where they can, advertisers will use the most detailed criteria available to increase the response to, and decrease the wastage of their advertising activity.

Social media, and people’s increasing willingness to share personal data has led to an explosion in the levels of targeting that an advertiser can access. To continue the Disney/Facebook example:

Facebook targeting options, Disney films

There are so many targeting criteria that can be used to target the Facebook audience, and all these options make the audience more valuable to the advertiser (and to Facebook). Disney films, parks and characters can be added to the interest category, and these people set up as a segment so that they will see the ads that are most targeted to them.

If the advertiser wanted to target grandparents also – say in the run up to Xmas, they can add extra age criteria to make it more relevant and tweak the ads even further.There is a segment called “babyboomers” who can be lured with nostalgic references to childhood toys of their youth.

Spooky?

Those who see the level of detail advertisers can access for the first time often react with horror – OMG!! They’re going to sell me stuff!!

Well my answer to that is

a) did you really think you get anything for free, really? and

b) at least the stuff they’ll try to sell you is vaguely relevant.

I’d be very bored very quickly if all the ads I ever saw were for golf equipment and incontinence pads (neither of which I have a need for, incidentally).

If you feel worried about your privacy then there are always ways you can prevent advertisers from knowing more about you.

Firstly, don’t be hanging around on Facebook. It’s like carrying a sandwich board around with you telling them how to sell to you, and when. If you must do, then set your posts to automatically show to “friends” only (not public), and don’t like/share ridiculous images that *obviously* aren’t going to suddenly start moving if you write a comment

While you’re at it, tick the “opt out” box on every form you ever fill in

Delete your cookies after every online session

Go and live in the desert, although you may just end up re-classified as “Self sufficient, rejecter of society, interested in green issues”.

Frankly, it’s a part of the world we live in, and whether you engage with it or not is your choice. You will see ads around every media you interact with, but you only make the advertiser’s job easier if you volunteer information to them. Choose wisely and carefully what you share with the public and commercial entities, and remember:

It is a universal belief in media negotiation that the other participant is, frankly, a bit stupid. The adversarial nature of so many negotiations leads to sales people assuming that agencies are blind to the true (brilliant) nature of the media they’re buying; and agencies’ assuming that sales people are all money grabbing liars who would sell their own mother for a few quid and a free jolly.

Having sat on both sides of the fence I now believe that most misunderstandings are due to context; exacerbated by the poor agency sod never having the time to truly get to know the media marketplace and enjoy the negotiation process. I’ve seen many buyers make bad choices and salespeople lose out because one or other of them doesn’t understand where the other, or the client is coming from, so I’ve attempted to dispel a few myths.

All this of course may be academic in a few years when all media is digitised and bought through Real Time Bidding, but in the meantime let’s all enjoy the process a bit more.

1) Don’t pile on the pressure.

I have heard media sales training sessions where the trainer has said, without irony, “If the client/agency is still saying no, they obviously still don’t have enough information.”. Quite apart from the potential damage that could result from harassing the media buyer until they are backed into a corner, the arrogance of this view appals me. There are definitely varying levels of knowledge amongst sales, agency and client staff; but there is always the possibility that these people have access to more/different information than you have, which may not be shareable and may in fact make their decision a stroke of genius. Either way, pressure sales techniques almost always backfire in business relationships where you hope or expect to speak to them again. I have seen media buyers refuse to pick up the phone to certain sales people as they’re actually quite scared of them, or advise their colleagues not to do business with them either due to their approach. Be gentle, and if necessary sacrifice the one sale for the longer term view.

2) Be generous with information

Having said all of the above, there will definitely be pieces of information to which you have access, that the media planner/buyer may not have seen or had the time to hunt out. Sharing things that make them understand your market/product better regularly – not just when you’re in the midst of a negotiation, is a great way to both be appreciated and to be seen as an expert. This applies even more to competitor information that their client may love to see. Any interesting snippets about other clients in the same sector where they’ve tried something and had a great success is always worth sharing (with as much proof of results as you can legally share), as this will almost always be shared directly with the client and get you further to the top of mind.

3) Answer the brief

I cannot name the number of times when I have shared a detailed brief with a short-list of media owners, with quite specific needs, only to be disappointed. In my experience the vast majority do not answer the actual brief, instead either sending a re-purposed sales PowerPoint with the client’s logo pasted in (and sometimes not editing the text to ensure that the rest of it doesn’t mention the previous client it was sent to); or maybe sending over a proposal which clearly misses the cost or performance criteria with a weak “Well if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” pitch, with no clear evidence of why the agency should risk their reputation on recommending this buy.

I cannot state too clearly – read the brief and answer the question, with just one sentence if necessary. If it is impossible to make the metrics/target work – say so, and say so early. This will save you both time and mean you get another crack at another campaign that may have different criteria, and a reputation for being honest, which is always a good thing in an incestuous industry.

4) Put your best foot forward – immediately.

Many times I have spoken to media buyers to tell them that they have not been chosen for a particular campaign, only for them to say “Oh, well if you’d told me, we could have matched those rates.” This is negotiation suicide. Basically the days of agencies having plenty of time to ring you back, negotiate rates gradually down and then eventually settle on something are well past. If you don’t put your “walk away” rates down at the very beginning (which other people will) you risk immediately being excluded, and by the time you speak to the buyer again the decision will already have been made and it’ll be too late for you to pull something out of the bag. Clearly going back with a very low rate every time isn’t healthy for your business, so the important part is packaging your rates correctly. By all means respond with a menu of options – one of which is rock bottom, but in offering these rates you are clear that the sacrifice will be in terms of the quality/data/visibility, and always have other options for the buyer to choose from. If they don’t see it, they can’t sell it to their client either. Tell them which is your favoured option, and why it is so much better for the client. Give it wings so that it’s hard for them to refuse. Even if the first client doesn’t like it or simply doesn’t have the budget, it may just get re-sent to their next client as an option.

5) Save the expenses for people you’re already doing business with

If you’re busy and stressed, the thought of having to make small talk with a random 23 year old who’ll try to sell to you for an hour and a half is not appealing. Even if it is at the poshest restaurant in town. Building business relationships absolutely makes sense, but save the jollies for after you’ve built a working relationship. The only time you should invite someone you don’t yet know is to something that’s useful to them and will make them better at their job – normally an educational seminar or large networking event with multiple people. One to one jollies are for the people who you are thanking or building something with, not a way in.

One of the first stories you hear when entering the advertising industry is John Wanamaker‘s famous quote – which has been bent over time but is a variation of

“I know that half my advertising spend is wasted

I just don’t know which half.”

Clearly this wasn’t good enough for John, and certainly isn’t the ideal scenario when the amount wasted can represent millions of pounds so an entire sub-industry has grown in advertising which is that of measuring ad effectiveness.

At a basic level ad effectiveness can me measured in 3 ways:

Direct measurement of sales:

In Direct Response marketing there are various methods of attributing sales to the media that triggered it. In online the bluntest way is the “last click wins” scenario, but there are also tried and tested methods for other media – dedicated phone numbers that will differ by medium or by copy iteration; coupons with codes to be quoted during a phone or store visit. Each has its values but as a general rule quoting coupon codes or source when visiting a store, buying on the phone or online is afflicted with a “tick the first one” mentality. List orders are changed but still there will be errors.

Measuring actions implying purchase intent:

This could be online enquiry forms filled out, store locator searches; phone calls, brochures sent out, appointments booked, actual store footfall – all of which are fairly taken as an indicator that the customer is getting closer to opening their wallet. Again there can be issues as it may be an indicator, but not a true reflection of what happens later.

Branding metrics:

This involves researching potential and actual customers, and asking them what they think. Often there will be a “brand recall” metric – how many people remember the name (prompted or unprompted); a “purchase intent” question and other factors that have been proven over time to reflect consumers’ eventual actions and indicate that a campaign has had a positive impact – recognition of ad straplines/ association with intended characteristics such as “trustworthy” or “good value”. When used with a large enough sample size to ensure statistical validity.

One of the many reasons that digital advertising has grown is its very measurability. Being able to see how many times an ad has been seen (impressions), its response rate (clicks) and the resulting actions (sales, enquiries, online brand research) means that in near-real time an advertiser can tweak the campaign to ensure that creative or ad copy that performs the best is the one that is seen most, and that they get the most out of their ad spend.

But do they?

The problems start with the default model for online ad measurement, which is last-click-wins. There are various factors that undermine the validity of this model, and these are best understood by remembering that the digital world is just one part of any consumer’s methods of interacting with a brand, and even that digital, trackable world is fractured.

The first is the basic assumption that the last thing someone did before a purchase is the most important. In the image below you can see a simple example of how someone researching and buying online interacted with different ad events:

In this instance the brand search would get all the credit for the conversion, but we can see that they interacted with the advertisers messaging in 3 other ways before then – all of which may or may not have had an influence on their later behaviour. A similar metaphor is the football team – although a striker may have scored the actual goal, the rest of the team are crucial in setting it up, defending their own goal etc.

If you planned your advertising spend based on the last click model the risk is that your ads wouldn’t be showing in the places that do help the process along, and therefore would sell less. In recognition of this the industry has spent the last few years discussing methods of sharing out the credit to “attribute” influence more fairly and have a more effective media strategy.

Some of these models are laid out below, showing from the top

“first and last” – where an advertiser believes (or the data shows) that the first and the last interaction carry the highest weight, the sale value is shared amongst them

“all but last click” could apply when the last click is proven to be a navigational brand search, and the credit for influencing the sale is shared amongst the interactions that had a harder job of persuasion

“shared” is where all the events get equal weighting as it’s proven that the sale relies just as much on each element

“last click” is the traditional model that is blunt but still the fastest data to access

Each model has its pros and cons, but they are infinitely better than last-click-wins, right?

Well, yes and no.

Firstly to work out the one that works best it requires an enormous amount of data crunching – the first days of Exposure to Conversion (or E2C – Doubleclick’s version of attribution modelling) required a data dump that broke excel. Just the discussions of which model to use can take days of discussion and each time you’d settle on a model there’d always be a “It just doesn’t feel right” comment from one stakeholder or another, and you’d have to re-assess the whole thing with a different cookie window. Try doing that every day and making hundreds of creative and channel optimisation decisions on the fly.

Secondly, it’s still only a partial view of the data. Remember that one person in this instance actually means “one device with a cookie on it”, and the last two years in particular have broken the desktop stranglehold for good; add to this the fact that most sales are still conducted in retail stores or on the phone, and you have a multi device and cross channel world:

Even if you can match a user across multiple digital devices (which you often can’t), tracking that same person as they watch telly, pick up the phone or walk into a shop adds complexity that reduces your chance of getting robust enough data in enough time to be actionable during the advertising campaign.

So what to do?

Firstly, realise that you’re not going to get a perfect answer. The beauty of digital is often seen as its trackability although this has lulled us all into a false sense of security about its accuracy; in the real world people always have been influenced by more things than you realise, so you have to cast the net as widely as possible. To see the bigger picture and treat the consumer as just that, as opposed to a cookied device, you really need to jump into the realm of econometrics, which research companies and large agencies have used for decades to apply some kind of cause/effect on their advertising activities and assess the true impact of each part of their marketing activity.

Put simply econometrics takes a vast amount of data and tries to find correlations. For the marketeer it can show the impact their media has on their sales (or any other known metric); how store location impacts success; and how weather/external market factors influence the overall base line of sales that you could expect without any other stimulus. The results from econometrics for a marketeer are often a) a sand diagram showing the influencing factors over time, and b) a Cost Per Acquisition hierarchy showing the difference between the linear (last click) tracked CPA, and the one inferred from the econometric models.

Example sand diagram as you may see from econometrics showing impacts of different media types over time, the left axis could be volumes of sales, leads, or currency values.

What often happens is that media that occurs in the earlier stages of a research/buy process proves to have been more influential than could be seen from the usual attribution model, which gives them credit for more sales. The difference between the linear sales and the modelled sales becomes a “multiplier” which is then applied to the linear results to show the true value of each media, and to aid in effective budget allocation.

The solution, ish.

My approach is always to use all the data I get get my hands on, in the most appropriate way.

Planning annual/quarterly media budgets needs the input of econometric multipliers to ensure that the stimulus media that kick off the consideration process get enough juice to start the pipeline off. Handily this kind of data is also a great help to show the FD that there is in fact a value in the media that otherwise struggles to prove its worth.

All this is well and good, but I have never met a marketeer or planner, brand or direct who doesn’t have to justify their weekly or monthly plans based on last click data, or at best a “last click plus “assists” model, so we have to face facts that the measurability of online is also a stick with which it can be beaten. For great context, look no further than this quote (often erroneously attributed to Einstein, but actually the work of sociologist William Bruce Cameron.)

Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted.